Wednesday, December 24, 2008

Some job application forms are badly designed

Greetings.

This is just a bit of complaining about the job application form I just filled in. Whoever put it together did a sloppy, poorly thought out job.

When the applicant must give only one of two possible choices, it should not be possible to select both choices. The easiest way to do this is to use radio buttons, which are a standard part of modern graphical user interfaces. This would have saved the Web programmer the trouble of adding extra code to complain about an illogical selection.

If a piece of information is required, it should be marked as such. It is hypocritical to give the impression that a field is optional and then complain when it is not filled in.

Applicants put together CVs and résumés so that all the information potential employers want is in one convenient place. Asking applicants to fill in all that information through tedious forms and fields gives the message “We care more about making things convenient for our data bases than for human beings.”